Review: Conversations with Other Women

RECOMMENDED
Hans Canosa’s experimental “Conversations with Other Women” out-DePalmas Brian DePalma with its incessant split-screen telling of a simple story, and while I’d hate to see too many movies indulging this format, the dueling performances of unnamed, unsympathetic characters, played by Aaron Eckhart and Helena Bonham Carter as a pair of former lovers who meet twenty years later at a wedding and retire to a New York hotel room, are a pleasure to observe in their non-intercut glory. (Canosa also uses the additional frame gimmick to indicate flashbacks and private reveries by the pair.) Written by Gabrielle Zevin, who understands (but hardly understates) the driving force of bullshit in its many layers and many manifestations in romantic chat that is intended to lead to bed and no further. While Eckhart furthers his run portraying chiseled creeps, Bonham Carter’s thought-furrowed playfulness is what puts the film over. 84m. (Ray Pride)